Pharmacometrics

"We develop and use mathematical models to understand drug and disease mechanisms, and to optimise drug development and therapy."

Pharmacometric research focuses on nonlinear mixed effects (”population”) models. Such models describe data, generally the response-time profiles observed in a clinical trial, by a basic model, accounting for the general structure of the underlying system, and a set of hierarchical variability components, accounting for variability between subjects, within subjects over time and remaining between observation variability.

Research at the pharmacometrics group is divided into four main areas:

First, development and evaluation of methods for efficient and robust model building. This involves development of estimation algorithms, methods for model diagnosis and sequential procedures for model building. The result of the research, when applicable, is made available as free software.

Second, so-called platform models are being developed for the use in specific therapeutic areas or for particular therapeutic/ pharmacological principles. Such a model may involve the time-course of a biomarker or a system of biomarkers during normal, diseased and/or provoked situations.

The third research area concerns utilization of the developed models for the purpose of designing studies, deciding upon dosing strategies and other developmental decisions.

Fourth, we also do analyses of dose-concentration-response data from trials to understand therapies with existing drugs with the aim of allowing improved therapy.